Shear stress distribution within narrowly constrained structured grains and granulated powder beds

An experimental study is presented here to understand the stress transmission characteristics under different geometrical arrangements of particulates inside a narrow chamber subjected to axial compression loading. The multi-grain systems considered here are face-centred, simple cubic and poly-dispersed structures, as well as inclusions embedded inside seeded, unseeded and cohesive powder bed of Durcal (calcium carbonate). The distribution of the maximum shear stress, direction of the major principal stress and shear stress concentration factor were obtained using photo stress analysis tomography (PSAT). The results show that the maximum shear stress distribution in the simple cubic structure is chain-like and self-repetitive, i.e, a single grain behaviour is representative of the whole system. This is not the case in the case of other granular packing. In the case of the inclusion surrounded by powder media, the maximum shear stress distribution in the inclusion occurs through ring-like structures, which are different from those observed in the structured granular packing. This tendency increases for an increase in the cohesivity of the surrounding particulates. In the granular systems, the direction of the major principal stress is mostly orthogonal to the direction of loading except in some particles in the random granular packing. In the case of inclusion surrounded by Durcal particulates, the directional of the major principal stress acts along the direction of the axial loading except in the ring region where this tends to be oblique to the direction of axial loading. Estimates of the shear stress concentration factor (k) show that, k tends to be independent of the structural arrangement of granular packing at higher load levels. In the case of inclusion surrounded by powder bed, k for the seeded granulated particulate bed is mostly independent of the external load levels. In the case of unseeded particulate (granulated) bed, a fluctuation in k is observed with the loading level. This suggests that the seeded granules could distribute stresses in a stable manner without much change in the nature of shear stress-transmitting fabric of the particulate contacts under external loading. An increase in the cohesion of particulate bed results in more plastic deformation as shown by the differential shear stress concentration factor. The results reported in this study show the usefulness of optical stress analysis to shed some scientific lights on unravelling some of the complexities of particulate systems under different structural arrangements of grains and surrounding conditions of the inclusions in particulate media

Toward Understanding Privileged Features Distillation in Learning-to-Rank

In learning-to-rank problems, a privileged feature is one that is available during model training, but not available at test time. Such features naturally arise in merchandised recommendation systems; for instance, "user clicked this item" as a feature is predictive of "user purchased this item" in the offline data, but is clearly not available during online serving. Another source of privileged features is those that are too expensive to compute online but feasible to be added offline. Privileged features distillation (PFD) refers to a natural idea: train a "teacher" model using all features (including privileged ones) and then use it to train a "student" model that does not use the privileged features. In this paper, we first study PFD empirically on three public ranking datasets and an industrial-scale ranking problem derived from Amazon's logs. We show that PFD outperforms several baselines (no-distillation, pretraining-finetuning, self-distillation, and generalized distillation) on all these datasets. Next, we analyze why and when PFD performs well via both empirical ablation studies and theoretical analysis for linear models. Both investigations uncover an interesting non-monotone behavior: as the predictive power of a privileged feature increases, the performance of the resulting student model initially increases but then decreases. We show the reason for the later decreasing performance is that a very predictive privileged teacher produces predictions with high variance, which lead to high variance student estimates and inferior testing performance.Comment: Accepted by NeurIPS 202

Knowledge-based trust and citizens' social commerce: the moderating role of citizens' purchase attitude

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Social commerce is a subset of electronic commerce and refers to transactions that are conducted through social commerce media. Social commerce creates new channels for consumers that improve not only their purchasing decisions but also their shopping experiences. The attitude of consumers is one of the factors that influence the behavioral intention of consumers. As long as the customer does not have confidence in the social business, he does not want to buy, and the trust that the buyer gains is based on the information, knowledge, transparency and capabilities that social business provide to customers. So, this paper aims to investigate the moderating role of attitude toward purchasing in the relationship between knowledge-based trust and citizens' social commerce and for this purpose, citizens of the east and southeast of Iran are considered as the case of study.METHODS: In terms of purpose, the present study is applied and based on the nature and method, it is descriptive-survey. The statistical population of the present study consisted of 361 citizens of the east and southeast of Iran who use social network and were selected by random sampling. Required data were collected by a questionnaire whose validity and reliability were confirmed and analyzed by structural equation modeling and partial least squares method. FINDINGS: Cronbach's alpha, composite reliability and Spearman correlation coefficients were greater than 0.7 and Communality was greater than 0.5, which indicated the high reliability of variables in the model. Also, the Average Variance Extracted square root of all variables was greater than the correlation of them with other variables. So, Discriminant validity of the model was appropriate. Average Variance Extracted was more than 0.5, which indicated the appropriate convergent validity of the variables. According to T-value, knowledge-based trust had a significant and direct effect (0.745) on citizens' social commerce. Knowledge-based trust explained 55.5% of changes in citizens' social commerce. According to T-Value, the attitude toward purchasing had a positive (+0.106) reciprocal role in the relationship of knowledge-based trust and social commerce.CONCLUSION: The findings showed that knowledge-based trust plays a positive role in social commerce; So, strengthening knowledge-based trust can lead to improved social commerce. Also, the attitude toward purchasing is positive moderator in the relationship between knowledge-based trust and social commerce; So, in order to change from a weak attitude to a strong attitude toward purchasing, the relationship between knowledge-based trust and citizens' social commerce is strengthened

Analysis of Physiochemical Parameters to Evaluate the Drinking Water Quality in the State of Perak, Malaysia

YesThe drinking water quality was investigated in suspected parts of Perak state, Malaysia, to ensure the continuous supply of clean and safe drinking water for the public health protection. In this regard, a detailed physical and chemical analysis of drinking water samples was carried out in different residential and commercial areas of the state. A number of parameters such as pH, turbidity, conductivity, total suspended solids (TSS), total dissolved solids (TDS), and heavy metals such as Cu, Zn, Mg, Fe, Cd, Pb, Cr, As, Hg, and Sn were analysed for each water sample collected during winter and summer periods. The obtained values of each parameter were compared with the standard values set by the World Health Organization (WHO) and local standards such as National Drinking Water Quality Standard (NDWQS). The values of each parameter were found to be within the safe limits set by the WHO and NDWQS. Overall, the water from all the locations was found to be safe as drinking water. However, it is also important to investigate other potential water contaminations such as chemicals and microbial and radiological materials for a longer period of time, including human body fluids, in order to assess the overall water quality of Perak state

Growth kinetics of nuclei formed from different binders and powders in vertical cylindrical mixing devices

peer-reviewedGranulation is the process of forming large aggregates from fine particles using a high shear mixer. This method is used in several industries from pharmaceuticals to chemical and fertilizer production. This research will study the effect of four process variables: speed of mixer rotation in the range 100–200 rpm, powder bed mass (25–40 g), mass of the initial nucleus (0.6–2 g), and binder viscosity (water, carboxymethyl cellulose (CMC) solutions with concentrations in the range 0.5–20 g/L) on single nuclei growth kinetics in low mixing devices. The powders under study were: lactose, tea, sugar, starch, and limestone. The results show the initial size of nuclei, the initial mass of the powder bed and binder viscosity and speed of rotation all influence the rate of nuclei growth. Analysis of the stokes deformation number of the nuclei show that growth rate of the nuclei decreases as the deformation number increases whilst the percentage gain in mass of the nuclei increases with increasing deformation number. The binder viscosity was shown to have the biggest influence of the growth rate of the nuclei. Results show that difference in powder density also has an effect on the growth kinetics of nuclei. The initial position of nuclei was also shown to influence the nuclei growth rate; the closer the starting position of the nuclei to the wall of the vessel the slower the growth rate

A micropillar array-based microfluidic chip for label-free separation of circulating tumor cells: The best micropillar geometry?

Introduction The information derived from the number and characteristics of circulating tumor cells (CTCs), is crucial to ensure appropriate cancer treatment monitoring. Currently, diverse microfluidic platforms have been developed for isolating CTCs from blood, but it remains a challenge to develop a low-cost, practical, and efficient strategy. Objectives This study aimed to isolate CTCs from the blood of cancer patients via introducing a new and efficient micropillar array-based microfluidic chip (MPA-Chip), as well as providing prognostic information and monitoring the treatment efficacy in cancer patients. Methods We fabricated a microfluidic chip (MPA-Chip) containing arrays of micropillars with different geometries (lozenge, rectangle, circle, and triangle). We conducted numerical simulations to compare velocity and pressure profiles inside the micropillar arrays. Also, we experimentally evaluated the capture efficiency and purity of the geometries using breast and prostate cancer cell lines as well as a blood sample. Moreover, the device’s performance was validated on 12 patients with breast cancer (BC) in different states. Results The lozenge geometry was selected as the most effective and optimized micropillar design for CTCs isolation, providing high capture efficiency (>85 %), purity (>90 %), and viability (97 %). Furthermore, the lozenge MPA-chip was successfully validated by the detection of CTCs from 12 breast cancer (BC) patients, with non-metastatic (median number of 6 CTCs) and metastatic (median number of 25 CTCs) diseases, showing different prognoses. Also, increasing the chemotherapy period resulted in a decrease in the number of captured CTCs from 23 to 7 for the metastatic patient. The MPA-Chip size was only 0.25 cm2 and the throughput of a single chip was 0.5 ml/h, which can be increased by multiple MPA-Chips in parallel. Conclusion The lozenge MPA-Chip presented a novel micropillar geometry for on-chip CTC isolation, detection, and staining, and in the future, the possibilities can be extended to the culture of the CTCs

Magnitude and determinants of excess total, age-specific and sex-specific all-cause mortality in 24 countries worldwide during 2020 and 2021: results on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic from the C-MOR project.

INTRODUCTION: To examine the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on mortality, we estimated excess all-cause mortality in 24 countries for 2020 and 2021, overall and stratified by sex and age. METHODS: Total, age-specific and sex-specific weekly all-cause mortality was collected for 2015-2021 and excess mortality for 2020 and 2021 was calculated by comparing weekly 2020 and 2021 age-standardised mortality rates against expected mortality, estimated based on historical data (2015-2019), accounting for seasonality, and long-term and short-term trends. Age-specific weekly excess mortality was similarly calculated using crude mortality rates. The association of country and pandemic-related variables with excess mortality was investigated using simple and multilevel regression models. RESULTS: Excess cumulative mortality for both 2020 and 2021 was found in Austria, Brazil, Belgium, Cyprus, England and Wales, Estonia, France, Georgia, Greece, Israel, Italy, Kazakhstan, Mauritius, Northern Ireland, Norway, Peru, Poland, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Ukraine, and the USA. Australia and Denmark experienced excess mortality only in 2021. Mauritius demonstrated a statistically significant decrease in all-cause mortality during both years. Weekly incidence of COVID-19 was significantly positively associated with excess mortality for both years, but the positive association was attenuated in 2021 as percentage of the population fully vaccinated increased. Stringency index of control measures was positively and negatively associated with excess mortality in 2020 and 2021, respectively. CONCLUSION: This study provides evidence of substantial excess mortality in most countries investigated during the first 2 years of the pandemic and suggests that COVID-19 incidence, stringency of control measures and vaccination rates interacted in determining the magnitude of excess mortality

The global, regional, and national burden of adult lip, oral, and pharyngeal cancer in 204 countries and territories:A systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019

Importance Lip, oral, and pharyngeal cancers are important contributors to cancer burden worldwide, and a comprehensive evaluation of their burden globally, regionally, and nationally is crucial for effective policy planning.Objective To analyze the total and risk-attributable burden of lip and oral cavity cancer (LOC) and other pharyngeal cancer (OPC) for 204 countries and territories and by Socio-demographic Index (SDI) using 2019 Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors (GBD) Study estimates.Evidence Review The incidence, mortality, and disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) due to LOC and OPC from 1990 to 2019 were estimated using GBD 2019 methods. The GBD 2019 comparative risk assessment framework was used to estimate the proportion of deaths and DALYs for LOC and OPC attributable to smoking, tobacco, and alcohol consumption in 2019.Findings In 2019, 370 000 (95% uncertainty interval [UI], 338 000-401 000) cases and 199 000 (95% UI, 181 000-217 000) deaths for LOC and 167 000 (95% UI, 153 000-180 000) cases and 114 000 (95% UI, 103 000-126 000) deaths for OPC were estimated to occur globally, contributing 5.5 million (95% UI, 5.0-6.0 million) and 3.2 million (95% UI, 2.9-3.6 million) DALYs, respectively. From 1990 to 2019, low-middle and low SDI regions consistently showed the highest age-standardized mortality rates due to LOC and OPC, while the high SDI strata exhibited age-standardized incidence rates decreasing for LOC and increasing for OPC. Globally in 2019, smoking had the greatest contribution to risk-attributable OPC deaths for both sexes (55.8% [95% UI, 49.2%-62.0%] of all OPC deaths in male individuals and 17.4% [95% UI, 13.8%-21.2%] of all OPC deaths in female individuals). Smoking and alcohol both contributed to substantial LOC deaths globally among male individuals (42.3% [95% UI, 35.2%-48.6%] and 40.2% [95% UI, 33.3%-46.8%] of all risk-attributable cancer deaths, respectively), while chewing tobacco contributed to the greatest attributable LOC deaths among female individuals (27.6% [95% UI, 21.5%-33.8%]), driven by high risk-attributable burden in South and Southeast Asia.Conclusions and Relevance In this systematic analysis, disparities in LOC and OPC burden existed across the SDI spectrum, and a considerable percentage of burden was attributable to tobacco and alcohol use. These estimates can contribute to an understanding of the distribution and disparities in LOC and OPC burden globally and support cancer control planning efforts

Global, regional, and national burden of colorectal cancer and its risk factors, 1990–2019: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019

Funding: F Carvalho and E Fernandes acknowledge support from Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P. (FCT), in the scope of the project UIDP/04378/2020 and UIDB/04378/2020 of the Research Unit on Applied Molecular Biosciences UCIBIO and the project LA/P/0140/2020 of the Associate Laboratory Institute for Health and Bioeconomy i4HB; FCT/MCTES through the project UIDB/50006/2020. J Conde acknowledges the European Research Council Starting Grant (ERC-StG-2019-848325). V M Costa acknowledges the grant SFRH/BHD/110001/2015, received by Portuguese national funds through Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT), IP, under the Norma Transitória DL57/2016/CP1334/CT0006.proofepub_ahead_of_prin